Keep It Weird
Maybe those heretics were on to something.
Tom Holland ends his recent Mockingbird Conference talk recommending that the Church return to weird. Author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Holland recognizes that many have left the church and/or no longer see the need for church, as had he.
In the same week, I was listening to Holland’s keynote, both The Atlantic and the New York Times published articles highlighting the precarious nature of pastoring in the current environment: How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church and A ‘Seismic Shift” Fractures Evangelicals, an Arkansas Pastor Leaves Home. Pastor, are you listening? Reading?
If that is not enough to overload your earbuds or keep your eyes on a page, Rod Dreher took David French to task for defending Tim Keller,, who was deemed passe by First Things. What is going on?! These odd collection of talks, articles, and rebuttals left me dizzy.
Then I began thinking about the connections to all of these.
More than twenty years ago, a nascent movement began to take shape. Not a few Gen Xers involved in church life gathered to talk about the future of the Church and the Faith. Like a flash in the pan, it was here today and gone in less than a decade. Scot McKnight and others made the pronouncement. John Piper bid farewell. Ed Stetzer wrote the brief history. Heretics. That is what these young wannabes were, just heretics.
At least that was the verdict cast from the center.
Now the Center Sounds Like
Them.
Take Rod Dreher’s response to David French’s response to Wood, who deconverted from Tim Keller. And the best I can tell, Keller minds his own business, doing what he often does with grace and gentleness.
That Dreher uses Renn is just silly sycophantic culture warring nonsense. Let me explain. A quick Google search for End of Christendom returns a link to Malcolm Muggeridge’s book published in 1980. The Google search also produced People Ask,
When did Christendom end?
The Wiki response points to the end of World War I.
The end of Christendom may not mean a fierce resistance to Christianity, but it certainly defies characterization as positive. Dating American secularization affecting Christianity and Christians to Ogberfell makes little sense.
The late religion observer, Phyliss Tickle, described several decentering events that marked the end of Christendom in her 2008 book, The Great Emergence. I heard her give several hours to the subject in Memphis just after the book came out. No one in that room believed Christianity still held ascendancy.
Dreher uses Renn’s taxonomy of American Secularization. Pitching recent history as marked by the socio-cultural receptivity of Christianity, Renn marks time since 1994 as Positive World (Pre-1994), Neutral World (1994-2014), and Negative World (2014-present). Rod privileges a taxonomy that fits his agenda, as do we all. But, to mark Positive World as American History to 1994 ignores prior assessments where authors pointed to the end of Christendom, which could well describe what Renn is doing were it not couched in specific culture warring decisions. That Renn marks the Moral Majority as an indicator of Positive World is nonsense. The Moral Majority was an aggressive response to the end of Christendom.
Listening Is Lost
Scot McKnight offered a series of blog posts quite a while back. He worked his way through a book about the salons in Europe where people carried on conversations. Listening was integral. And at the same time, I am not sure everyone was listening to that rabble-rousing group back then. To borrow from youth minister growing up, plenty were hearing; they just were not listening.
They were hearing things like Preachings is dead! Youth ministry is dead! Children’s Ministry is dead! Christian Publishing is dead! Those were attention-grabbing lines to say, “The way we are doing things will not endure.”
And here we are.
Polling from PRRI to Barna to Christianity Today point to a scrambling church. How do we keep ministries alive? We are retracing the Promise Keeper steps with a revision under the rubric of Masculine Christianity. Can we go back? And, do we want to?
When a couple comes for marriage counseling, I often reply to their desire to “Get back to the way things were” with, “No, that is what brought you to this place today.” Some hear but don’t listen. They don’t want the hard work required. When the relationship fails, it becomes the counselor’s fault, the one who has no agency to decide within the marriage to make things different.
Asking the culture to change to make Christianity less difficult today is asking someone with no agency to decide within the church to make things different for the church. If something needs changing in or about the Church, it is not on the culture to do it.
But alas, no one is listening.
Weird?
A young pastor friend is working on his Doctor of Ministry degree. I am his reader. He reminded me of R. Alan Streett’s work, Subversive Meals. Streett makes the point that early Christians were aware of the prevailing habits of the culture around them. When it came time to gather for meals, early Christians would arrange their gatherings consistent with what would be cultural custom. During the meal Christians would share their meal ending with Communion as a means to introduce their new Way.
Weird!
In Jesus’ Farewell Discourse in John, his Last Discourse, his Good-bye Discourse, he is asked about how he will reveal himself to the disciples but not to the world. A close read indicates that Jesus will indeed reveal himself through the disciples to the world. Streett’s work makes that point.
Imagine missing this line in John 14,
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.
I do not give to you as the world gives.
And yet, critics of Keller have decided that things are so different that our only recourse is to fight fire with fire. Jesus may bring peace, but he is clearly not living in 2022. We need more butt kicking than bootlicking! No incrementalism of the sanctifying work of the Spirit! We need to take over. Put our people in charge!
We are not smarter that those before us. And, times aren’t worse than the seasons before us. And, we certainly aren’t smarter than Jesus when it comes to his Way.
Quibble about Keller’s ideas all you want. But to decide that a soft answer no longer turns away wrath, that gentleness and kindness are no longer fruits of the Spirit, and insist the need to turn bombastic is Jesus’ new Way? You don’t need more information, you need a new aim.
Holland’s suggestion that going forward Christians need to keep it weird is a reminder that the history of the Church is at its best when it decides against the ethos of the prevailing culture and maintains the Way of Jesus.
Remember, Jesus’ harshest words were not reserved for the Romans but the religious.